Moving Up from Local Play: Path to Competitive Magic: the Gathering Part 2

Hello everyone, my name is Duy Vu from Swish Gaming. Welcome back to my series on Moving Up from Local Play. If you didn’t get a chance to read the first part, you can find it here - https://allstarsportsgr.com/mtg-blog/moving-up-from-local-play/

In the first article, I talked about technical foundation, judges, metagame, and sideboard strategy. As I mentioned in the prior article, today we are going to tackle the topic of creating a playtest group. It lets us move from being a Johnny or Timmy into a Spike, while keeping the favorite parts of being a Johnny and a Timmy because you can trust I still love doing overly complicated combos with Urza, High Lord Artificer or casting a Primeval Titan.

Prior to the pandemic, I had a loose playgroup that I would test with on occasion but there was not a true structure to how we handled the testing. The most extensive testing I did was meeting up on a Sunday afternoon and jamming matches against other people. We played around with different decks but we didn’t take it any further. So let’s dive into what we need to take a loose group into

Forming Your Playtest Groups

So we could all use some timely reinforcements when we are in the thick of it, but we should strive to be prepared with our people already by our side. Your group should all have a similar mindset of what you are looking to achieve. If your group is split on its objective, you will never reach your goal. As we are talking about moving up from local play, we are going to set our goal as qualifying for the Regional Championships (RC) so that means we are competing in Regional Championship Qualifiers (RCQ) and similar events which are able to qualify us for the RC. You also need to decide on a structure that is going to work with the entire group to communicate, test, and have meetings when needed. Discord Server Groups to a test group is my favorite method of communicating, testing, and hosting meetings as my prior method of testing is through Magic the Gathering Online or Magic the Gathering Arena. Communication can be broken into different categories and sections easily with how Discord allows us to separate conversations. You can also keep the group locked down or opened up as much as you would like. I have created a new playtest group for each new RC or PT I have qualified for along with a basegroup that I test with when I am not playing towards a specific event.

What You Should Look For

Let’s put on our thinking cap and talk about what we should look for. I find that I want my playtest groups to have a mix of archetype or format specialists, brewers who can understand new cards and how they can generate new builds of current decks or spawn new decks, the workhorses of the group who can grind through matches to get better understanding of match up and builds, and finally the people who can fine tune decks. People are often more than a singular role but these are the categories I am looking for when I create my groups since this will allow for me to approach a format or event with a wide breadth of knowledge from the specialists, then we split up the brewers and fine tuners into groups that let them play around with different decks. The workhorses pull from the lists that are generated and can give feedback. It allows for you to split up the work and have set goals.

Foster Discourse

A pointed discussion at a knife's edge is not where we want to be when we are creating conversations about how to approach a new format or a new list of cards during spoiler season. We do want to make sure conversations are staying on track though so you will need to have a moderator when you are having meetings and leading discussions to make sure you are giving time to ideas to be appropriately discussed while not devoting too much time to a card or deck if it is a dead end. This is the most difficult task to balance as they will need to make judgment calls. Or the group will need to have a method of consensus to move onto the next topic. Your group will need to create their own methods for handling this and it may change from group to group. I have been the leader and moderator for some groups while in others I only added the conversation when needed. You will need to see where your role is and how you can best help out a group. A playtest group I was part of called this the “Superpower(s)” discussion and each person brought forth what they felt were their strengths for a group and we built from this conversation what we had and what we lacked.

I appreciate you reading the continued piece and hope you will join me in the next article as we continue to develop how you can move from local play to the RC and on. - Duy Vu